WHERE: On stage in the Shriver Hall Auditorium on The Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md. (Media camera crews will be allowed on stage.) Shriver Hall is Building 66 on the campus map that can be viewed at this site: http://bit.ly/1PMlz2J. Parking is available in the nearby South Garage.

WHO: Forty-three Johns Hopkins freshmen from an introductory mechanical engineering course will compete. Teams of two or three students have each built a two-part device, together powered by no more than two mousetraps and three rubber bands.

WHAT: Each team’s launching component will be positioned atop one of two elevated platforms on the Shriver Hall stage, a short distance from two upward-sloping ramps.

On top of or within each team’s launching component, the students must install a “vehicle” that carries a Blue Jay Beanie Baby, selected in honor of the university’s sports mascot. Each launch system must include a student-designed timing mechanism to control when the launch occurs. Certain materials from the class lab and elsewhere could be utilized to build the components, but the total cost for each project could not exceed $15.

THE CONTEST: Through a series of competitions involving two teams at a time, the launch devices must hurl their vehicles toward their respective ramps. However, the students’ timing mechanisms must control these launches so that they occur between 5 and 30 seconds after the official start of each match. The winner of each match is the team whose blue jay comes to rest farthest from its respective ramp.

WHY: While working on their projects, students have been learning about design approaches, potential and kinetic energy, friction, prototyping methods and other topics relevant to mechanical engineering. In addition, the project requires teamwork and careful planning, which both will be important in an engineering workplace. Some devices may fall during the matches, so students have been urged to make their creations durable and reusable.

CONTEST JUDGE AND FACULTY SUPERVISOR FOR THE EVENT: Steven Marra, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, teaches the course and will serve as judge. “This is the first experience many of our incoming engineering students have in actually designing and building something,” Marra said. “It sets the stage for several increasingly more advanced design projects they will complete during their engineering education at Johns Hopkins.”

Prior to the competition, Marra can be interviewed by calling his office, 410-516-0034. To obtain detailed rules and guidelines regarding the student competition, contact Marra.

Johns Hopkins University graduate Oladotun “Dotun” Opasina has been named a Schwarzman Scholar, the first from the university to win the newly established award.

Opasina, a 24-year-old from Nigeria who graduated in May with a master’s degree in engineering management, is one of 129 students to win a Schwarzman scholarship this year. The scholarships provide all expenses for a year at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, to study, travel and develop a better understanding of China.

As a Schwarzman Scholar, Opasina plans to study public policy, specifically the role technology plays in China, looking for parallels that could benefit his home country. He called the opportunity “pretty exciting.”

“The scholarship made a lot of sense because I’m Nigerian and I’m curious about how technology interacts in the day-to-day lives of people in a fast-growing country,” he said.

At Johns Hopkins, Opasina served as co-chair of the Graduate Representative Organization. He was a 2013 summa cum laude graduate from Morgan State University. He now works as a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs in New Jersey.

Schwarzman Scholars was inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship. Blackstone Co-Founder Stephen A. Schwarzman personally contributed $100 million to the program and is leading a fundraising campaign to raise an additional $350 million from private sources to endow the program in perpetuity.

The $450 million endowment will support up to 200 scholars annually for a one-year master’s degree program at Tsinghua University, where students pursue degrees in public policy; economics and business, or international studies.

Admissions opened in the fall of 2015, with the first class of students in residence in 2016.

]]>http://releases.jhu.edu/2016/12/01/johns-hopkins-graduate-named-schwarzman-scholar/feed/0Mouse Tests Aim to Show How Genes and Environment Join Forces to Cause Diseasehttp://releases.jhu.edu/2016/10/25/mouse-tests-aim-to-show-how-genes-and-environment-join-forces-to-cause-disease/
http://releases.jhu.edu/2016/10/25/mouse-tests-aim-to-show-how-genes-and-environment-join-forces-to-cause-disease/#respondTue, 25 Oct 2016 21:52:42 +0000http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=15281NIH-Funded Research Will Study How Lead Exposure Affects Human

When researchers try to uncover the cause of disease, they commonly start with two questions: Did a quirk in the patient’s genes open the door to illness? Did exposure to environmental factors play havoc with the patient’s health?

Very often, both troublemakers are at least partly to blame. To provide the most effective treatment, doctors need to know as much as possible about how these partners in sickness and poor health work together.

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Texas A&M University have launched an ambitious new effort to gather such knowledge, with support from a $5.3 million National Institutes of Health grant. The team’s goal is to learn at a fundamental level how genes and environmental factors interact to cause human disease.

Andrew Feinberg

The project is being led by Andrew Feinberg, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Epigenetics at Johns Hopkins, and David Threadgill, professor and chair of genetics at the Texas A&M College of Medicine and director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Society at Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.

Two NIH units—the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences—will provide the funding over a five-year period. Support from these two sources reflects the project’s dual research threads.

“Human disease is not purely genetic or environmental,” Feinberg said. “So we are using controlled exposure and controlled genetics in mice—in ways we can never do in humans—to find out how environmental factors like lead exposure and diet cause disease. This should allow us to understand how genes and the environment co-conspire to cause illness.”

Epigenetics is the study of genetic activity changes that occur without alteration of the basic DNA sequences. Sometimes, epigenetic changes triggered by environmental factors lead to serious health problems. As a first step toward averting or treating such illnesses, researchers need to figure out precisely how this process unfolds.

“The environment is perhaps the major contributor to human disease, yet its effect is virtually impossible to control for in human genetic studies,” Feinberg said. “One example of how this team will try to get around this problem is by studying a very genetically diverse set of mouse strains and an environmental issue that is important to many people: exposure to lead and how it is linked to significant health and behavioral issues.”

Feinberg said the team will use advanced genomic and mathematical methods to gather data and relate these findings directly to human disease population studies in order to understand how our distinct genomes and individual exposures to environmental factors affect human health.

“We are using epigenetic information,” he said, “to understand how genes and environment connect as information that reprograms our bodies in early development to behave in a healthy or unhealthy way, and how it sets us up for adverse responses to stressors later in life. In particular, we are studying lead exposure in the mouse model and then will connect these results to a large group of urban lead-exposed people in Baltimore and the behavioral effects this exposure causes.”

Feinberg’s research in Baltimore will draw on expertise from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, Whiting School of Engineering, and Bloomberg School of Public Health.

At Texas A&M University, Threadgill will supervise the portions of the research focusing on genetics and clinical phenotyping in the animal models. “My research group has a long-standing interest in how environmental exposures, such as chemicals and diet, interact with our genetics to impact future health and disease and, importantly, how this knowledge can be used to reduce the health impacts of detrimental environmental exposures,” he said. “We hope that this work will lay the foundation for understanding the mechanisms by which the environment alters our health and to identify interventions that can reduce the negative impacts of disease.”

Johns Hopkins scientist leads work on new algorithms for more complete DNA portraits

Scientists’ effort to piece together the genome is taking a significant step forward with a new computerized method that creates more complete and detailed versions of the complex puzzle of life than have ever been produced before.

“We hope and expect this advance will change how new genomes will be sequenced and studied since it gives such an improved view of what is really there,” said Michael Schatz, Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science and Biology within Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He coordinated a group of 17 scientists from nine institutions in publishing their results in the current issue of Nature Methods.

“Without this approach, you will simply miss a lot of important gene sequences, and many errors can be introduced,” said Schatz, who worked closely with researchers at Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, California and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. He was joined by Johns Hopkins colleague, Fritz J. Sedlazeck, a postdoctoral researcher.

Also involved in the research were scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute; the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; University of California, Davis; University of Nevada, Reno; Universita degli Studi di Verona, Verona, Italy.

The development of the two algorithms, FALCON and FALCON-Unzip, that are available free to the public, Schatz said, is analogous to the move from a primitive telescope “that can only see the closest, brightest objects in the sky, to the Hubble space telescope that can dramatically improve the resolution to see things that are much more distant and in much greater focus.”

The improvement from previous methods could have a significant impact in biology and medicine, as “genome assembly is one of the most fundamental and important steps in molecular biology to study the genetics of any living thing,” he said.

Beginning in the 1970s, genome “sequencing” – meaning the process of determining the complete DNA map of an organism at one time – has since produced the life codes for a number of microorganisms, plants and animals, including humans. While many of these have been touted as the “whole genome,” most of them, including the human genome, are not. In most published genomes, big pieces of the picture have been left out.

In producing more detailed genomes of three important species, including the Cabernet Sauvignon red wine grape, the researchers who worked on the new paper show how their approach improves on previous methods. Specifically, most other approaches, Schatz said, “would completely skip the fact that our genome and many genomes are actually ‘diploid’ and have two copies of each chromosome — one from mom and one from dad. Those two copies can be very different from each other, including genes or mutations that you only inherit from your mother or from your father.”

In all three species studied for this paper — Cabernet Sauvignon, a widely studied flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, and a coral fungus – the scientists found large segments of DNA that were specific to one of the two copies.

“An analogy of this might be that previous methods for sequencing genomes would give you a black-and-white representation – ‘haploid,’ just 1 copy of each chromosome,” Schatz said. “But our new software gives you a full-color representation allowing you to see all the details hidden in the shadows.”

The greater detail and accuracy is partly due to the fact that the algorithm produces fewer and bigger puzzle pieces. That is, longer sections of the four chemical compounds known as nucleotides that make up the DNA sequence: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. Larger sections mean fewer gaps and greater precision in understanding what the sequence means.

In the grape genome, for instance, previous methods left the genome shattered into up to 12.8 million pieces averaging only 1,000 nucleotides long. The new approach for the Cabernet Sauvignon grape produces 718 contiguous pieces averaging 2.1 million nucleotides long.

One technical challenge of producing the longer segments was the error rate of 10 to 15 percent in the single molecule sequencing technology used. However, using sophisticated statistical and computational filtering – a corrective lens for DNA sequencing — the system reduces that to on average one error every 10,000 to 100,000 nucleotides, an average error rate of only 0.01% to 0.001%.

Another group of scientists has already used versions of the software to assemble and study the gorilla genome earlier this year, and Schatz said his lab is using the method to study plants, animals, microorganisms that cause disease as well as healthy and diseased human genomes, including studies of cancer.

The Clark Charitable Foundation is giving the Johns Hopkins University $15 million to provide financial aid and enhanced learning opportunities for undergraduate engineering students.

A. James Clark

The gift honors the late A. James Clark, a former trustee of the university and of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and a construction engineer and executive for more than 60 years.

The largest endowed scholarship gift ever to the university’s Whiting School of Engineering, it creates the Clark Scholars Program and substantially strengthens the university’s ability to attract talented engineering students while providing need-based aid, the university said. The program began this year with 10 Clark Scholars among the Whiting School’s fall semester freshmen.

Clark Scholars will work with faculty mentors, network with professional engineers and learn from experts in their fields as part of leadership, business and innovation training during their undergraduate years. They also will contribute to the Baltimore community through service-learning projects.

“The Clark Charitable Foundation’s magnificent gift reflects Jim Clark’s enduring legacy at Johns Hopkins of transforming the architecture of our university and helping to educate the engineering leaders of tomorrow,” said Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university. “This gift continues Jim’s vision to create an environment that will foster engineering leadership to benefit our society now and for the future.”

Courtney Clark Pastrick, board chair of the Clark Charitable Foundation, said that her father “fervently believed that engineering — from biomedical, environmental and civil to mechanical, electrical and all other fields — is vitally important to the future of our society.

“We are proud to partner with Johns Hopkins,” she said, “in helping to train future engineering leaders by providing them practical engineering experiences and challenging them to develop solutions to today’s real-world needs.”

Clark, who died in March 2015 at age 87, was chairman and chief executive officer of Clark Enterprises and built Clark Construction Group LLC to be one of the country’s largest privately held general building contractors.

“Jim Clark helped transform our university, from the buildings his company built to the research and education he supported,” said Ed Schlesinger, the current Benjamin T. Rome Dean. “We see this in Clark Hall, the clinical towers on the East Baltimore campus, and his investment in people through the Rome Deanship.

“This gift is a continuation of his vision and is consistent with the Whiting School’s mission to create an environment that fosters engineering leaders and leadership for the benefit of society and our country,” Schlesinger said.

“We are all the beneficiaries of Mr. Clark’s counsel and enduring vision,” the dean added. “We are immensely grateful to the Clark Charitable Foundation for the immediate impact and lasting legacy the Clark Scholars Program will have now and for generations to come.”

The annual income from the Clark Scholars endowment will be matched by the President’s Office, as is the case for all new endowed gifts to the university for undergraduate financial aid.

The gift establishing the Clark Scholars Program is part of Rising to the Challenge: The Campaign for Johns Hopkins, an effort to raise $5 billion, primarily directed toward students, research and discovery, and interdisciplinary solutions to some of humanity’s most important problems. The campaign, supporting both the university and Johns Hopkins Medicine, began in January 2010, was publicly launched in May 2013, and is targeted for completion in June 2018. To date, the campaign has raised $4.4 billion.

Supported by a $9-million grant from the National Cancer Institute, a diverse team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has begun looking for new ways to attack one of the scariest traits of this disease: its frequent refusal to stay in one place.

The new funding, to be allocated over a five-year period, will enable scholars in physical sciences, engineering, applied mathematics, cancer biology and other disciplines to pool their expertise to solve stubborn cancer-related mysteries.

The Johns Hopkins center’s primary goal is to figure out precisely how and why some cells break away from one tumor site and spread the disease to other parts of the body in a process called metastasis.

The researchers say the reason to focus on this process is simple: about 90 percent of human cancer deaths are caused by metastasis.

Serving as director and principal investigator of the new center is Denis Wirtz, who is the university’s vice provost for

The top image depicts a cancer cell crawling atop a flat lab dish in the way cancer cell movement has traditionally been studied. Bottom image shows a cancer cell traveling through a 3D matrix that more closely resembles the environment through which cancer cells move in a human body. Researchers in the new Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center will utilize this 3D tracking process. Images by Jennifer E. Fairman, assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Department of Art as Applied to Medicine .

research, its T. H. Smoot Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

“Instead of looking at other aspects like tumor growth, I’ll be working with my colleagues in the schools of engineering and medicine to uncover the physical underpinnings of cancer metastasis,” Wirtz said. “The ‘team science’ approach in our center should result in the creation of new therapies targeting metastasis, the primary cause of human cancer deaths.”

For instance, the researchers want to identify the physical and/or biochemical cues that cause cancers cells to break away from a tumor in the first place. Then, once the tumor cells receive this “go” signal, the researchers want to find out precisely how these runaway cells escape through a highly confined area of bone and tissue and travel toward nearby blood vessels to hitch a ride to another part of the body.

Denis Wirtz — Photo by Will Kirk/Homewood Photography

“If we can get a much better idea of exactly how this chain of events works,” Wirtz said, “then we can look for ways to disrupt the process and perhaps keep cancer from spreading.”

Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the university’s Whiting School of Engineering, endorses Wirtz’s strategy. “By approaching the problem of metastasis from an engineering perspective,” Schlesinger said, “Denis has provided an entirely new understanding of cell motility and has opened the doors to the possibility of new and far more effective cancer treatments.”

The 2016 grant from the NCI, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, creates a new center that will build on the discoveries made by the previous research center. It will also participate in the NCI Physical Sciences-Oncology Network.

“As a complement to traditional cancer research approaches, the innovative trans-disciplinary approaches and perspectives in the PS-ON will aid in unraveling the complexity of cancer,” said Nastaran Kuhn, associate director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Biology PS-ON program. “These approaches are aimed at understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of cancer progression and ultimately developing effective cancer therapies.”

The new Johns Hopkins center’s associate director is Kenneth Pienta, a professor of urology, oncology, and pharmacology and molecular sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Kimmel Cancer Center. Currently, Pienta’s research involves studying tumor microenvironments and how they contribute to the formation of tumors and metastasis. His bench laboratory program focuses on the development of new therapies for prostate cancer.

The current NCI funding for a new Physical Sciences-Oncology Center at Johns Hopkins will support research teams focusing on three primary areas:

The Role of Physical Cues in Collective Cell Invasion – This project will examine how the physical forces exerted upon cancer cells when they are confined within a tumor can affect the migration of these cells, both collectively and individually. The team is led by Konstantinos Konstantopoulos, chair of the university’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Forces Involved in Collective Cell Migration – When they break away from a tumor, some cancers cells seem to prefer to travel in groups. This team, led by center director Wirtz, will study the forces involved in organizing the collective migration of breast cancer cells in both 2D and 3D environments.

Impact of low oxygen on the migration of sarcoma cells – Low oxygen within a tumor (hypoxia) dramatically increases pulmonary metastasis and results in poor health outcomes. Researchers led by Sharon Gerecht, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, will try to determine how primary tumor cells respond to oxygen in their microenvironment. The goal is to better understand the spread of cancer and identify new treatment targets.

Other members of the Johns Hopkins PS-OC center include Andy Ewald and Daniele Gilkes of the School of Medicine, Pei-Hsun Wu and Sean X. Sun of the Whiting School of Engineering, Karin Eisinger and Celeste Simon of the University of Pennsylvania, and Charles Wolgemuth of the University of Arizona.

Using high-tech human heart models and mouse experiments, scientists at Johns Hopkins and Germany’s University of Bonn have shown that beams of light could replace electric shocks in patients reeling from a deadly heart rhythm disorder.

The findings, published online Sept. 12 in the October 2016 edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, could pave the way for a new type of implantable defibrillators.

Current devices deliver pulses of electricity that are extremely painful and can damage heart tissue. Light-based treatment, the Johns Hopkins and Bonn researchers say, should provide a safer and gentler remedy for patients at high risk of arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat that can cause sudden cardiac death within minutes.

This idea springs from advances in the field of optogenetics, in which light-sensitive proteins are embedded in living tissue, enabling the use of light sources to modify electrical activity in cells.

“We are working towards optical defibrillation of the heart, where light will be given to a patient who is experiencing cardiac arrest, and we will be able to restore the normal functioning of the heart in a gentle and painless manner,” said Natalia Trayanova, who supervised the research at Johns Hopkins.

To move the new heart treatment closer to reality, the scientists at the University of Bonn and Johns Hopkins focused on two different types of research.

The Bonn team conducted tests on beating mouse hearts whose cells had been genetically engineered to express proteins that react to light and alter electrical activity within the organ.

When the Bonn researchers triggered ventricular fibrillation in the mouse heart, a light pulse of one second applied to the heart was enough to restore normal rhythm. “This is a very important result,” said Tobias Bruegmann, one of the lead authors of the journal article. “It shows for the first time experimentally that light can be used for defibrillation of cardiac arrhythmia.”

To find out if this technique could help human patients, Trayanova’s team at Johns Hopkins performed an analogous experiment within a detailed computer model of a human heart, one derived from MRI scans taken of a patient who had experienced a heart attack and was now at risk of arrhythmia.

“Our simulations show that a light pulse to the heart could stop the cardiac arrhythmia in this patient,” said Patrick M. Boyle, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering research professor who was also a lead author of the journal article.

To do so, however, the method from the University of Bonn had to be tweaked for the human heart by using red light to stimulate the heart cells, instead of the blue light used in mice. Boyle, who is a member of Trayanova’s lab team, explained that the blue light used in the much smaller mouse hearts was not powerful enough to fully penetrate human heart tissue. The red light, which has a longer wavelength, was more effective in the virtual human tests.

“In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of optogenetic defibrillation in a virtual heart of a patient, the simulations revealed the precise ways in which light alters the collective electrical behavior of the cells in the heart to achieve the desired arrhythmia termination,” Trayanova said.

Boyle added that this aspect of the study highlighted the important role that computational modeling can play in guiding and accelerating the development of therapeutic applications for cardiac optogenetics, a technology that is still in its infancy.

Junior Professor Philipp Sasse of the Institute of Physiology I at the University of Bonn, who is corresponding author of the study and supervised the project in Germany, agreed that the promising light treatment will require much more time and research before it can become a commonplace medical procedure.

“The new method is still in the stage of basic research,” Sasse said. “Until implantable optical defibrillators can be developed for the treatment of patients, it will still take at least five to ten years.”

Sasse and Trayanova were co-authors of the journal article, along with Christoph C. Vogt and Bernd K. Fleischmann of the University of Bonn, and Thomas V. Karanthanos and Hermenegild J. Arevalo of Johns Hopkins.

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (SA 1785/5-1 and 571 Research Training Group 1873 to P.S.), the Bonfor Program, Medical Faculty, University of 572 Bonn (O-162.0011 to P.S.), and the National Institutes of Health (DP1 HL123271, R01 573 HL105216, and R01 HL103428, and R01 HL126802 to N.A.T.)

Data scientists seek to extract useful insights from complicated data sets. Dubbed by the Harvard Business Review as “the sexiest job of the 21st century,” data science requires skills that have quickly become among the most sought-after in government and industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs for statisticians (which data scientists are considered to be) are projected to grow 34 percent between 2014 and 2024, much faster than the national average.

“We’re excited to offer cutting-edge courses in this area to new students and also current students who are interested in supplementing their coursework,” said James C. Spall, also a co-chair of the program. “Our program balances modern theory with real-world, practical exercises, so students can apply the skills they learn right away.”

The curriculum of Johns Hopkins Engineering’s Data Science Program blends computer science and applied mathematics, and prepares students to identify and analyze relationships in a wide variety of complicated data sets. To earn the master’s degree, graduates will complete 10 courses, either online or by combining online and on-site courses, in subjects like data visualization, cloud computing and statistical models.

“Given the proliferation of data-intensive disciplines, we developed a program that responds to the changing needs of the world,” said Associate Dean Dexter G. Smith of the Whiting School. “It will enable students to build the technical skills needed to manage and interpret the massive influx of data.”

To be considered for the Master of Science in Data Science program, applicants must have completed prerequisite coursework in multivariate calculus, discrete mathematics, Java or C++, Python, R and data structures. Johns Hopkins Engineering is accepting student applications for the spring 2017 and summer 2017 terms.

About Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals

Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals gives working adults a convenient way to advance their education and competitiveness in 21 traditional and newly emerging fields. Building on the world-class reputation and dynamic resources of the Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals offers online and on-site classes at times that complement the busy schedules of today’s practicing engineers and scientists.

Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell, a Johns Hopkins engineering professor who designs medical imaging systems that link light, sound and robotics to produce clearer pictures, was honored today by MIT Technology Review, which placed her on its prestigious 2016 list of 35 Innovators Under 35. The list annually spotlights the nation’s most promising young scientists.

The magazine recognized Bell for her innovative work as an inventor in the fields of biotechnology and medicine. The honor places her amid lofty company.

Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell. Photo by Will Kirk/Homewood Photography

“Over the years, we’ve had success in choosing young innovators whose work has been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs,” said Jason Pontin, the magazine’s editor in chief and publisher. “Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook; and Jonathan Ive, chief designer of Apple. We’re proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate, and we’re proud to add Muyinatu Bell to this prestigious list.”

“I was thrilled!” Bell said about learning that she’d been selected. “I keep track of people who’ve been on the list, and I deeply respect their work. It is a great honor to join this amazing group of pioneers and innovators who have changed the world with their technologies.”

Bell’s interest in how things work goes back her childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. When she was only 6 years old, she announced to her family that she was going to be a scientist when she grew up. As she excelled in school, she steered her aspirations toward engineering, which combined her two favorite subjects: math and science.

At Johns Hopkins, she founded and directs the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab, where she is designing the next generation of medical imaging systems using fiber optics, lasers, ultrasound systems and robot-assisted surgical tools. The goal is to generate clearer live views of a patient’s internal anatomy to help surgeons avoid injuring critical features such as blood vessels and nerves while performing delicate procedures.

“To achieve our mission of harnessing the promise of engineering to change the world for the better, it is essential for us to identify, invest in, and support young, innovative researchers such as Muyinatu Bell, who I am confident will move society forward,” said Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering. “Her work has many applications including, for example, the potential to transform the way surgeons visualize arteries hidden by bone during complex neurosurgeries.”

Schlesinger added, ”As one manifestation of our deep partnership with our School of Medicine, Prof. Bell is in the process of setting up her laboratory space in the new Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation in the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and she will benefit from her appointment in our newly formed Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, which was created to speed the deployment of research-based innovations that will enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency of health care. Working with our colleagues in medicine at Hopkins, our goal is to bring technologies to practical implementation. We are thrilled that the editors of MIT Technology Review share our view of Prof. Bell as a true innovator.”

The robotics aspect of Bell’s work builds on her collaborations with experts in the university’s Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics to control individual ultrasound and photoacoustic system components and extend human reach. For example, Bell’s photoacoustic imaging system was recently integrated with a research da Vinci Surgical System to remotely control the use of an optical fiber to provide optimal views of hidden vessel boundaries during procedures that are performed through incisions as small as a keyhole.

Bell plans to align her inventions with patient care at Johns Hopkins Hospital to move toward clinical use of the devices, methodologies and tools developed in the PULSE Lab. The aim is to expand and transform the realm of surgical and diagnostic possibilities.

***

Starting today, this year’s 35 Innovators Under 35 honorees will be featured online at www.technologyreview.com, and will appear in the September/October print magazine, which hits newsstands worldwide on August 29. They will appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference October 18–20 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (www.EmTechMIT.com).

When a battlefield explosion injures a soldier’s face or neck, the critical air passage between the head and lungs often becomes blocked, which can lead to brain damage and death within minutes.

To help treat such injuries, a Johns Hopkins undergraduate team has designed a low-cost, low-tech device dubbed CricSpike that may boost the success rate when combat medics need to create an artificial airway and pump air into the lungs. The goal of this procedure is to keep wounded soldiers alive until more advanced treatment can be administered at a hospital.

Although more tinkering and testing are needed, the students’ early prototype design has already earned awards at two recent medical device competitions.

The student invention focuses on the emergency neck-incision tactic called a cricothyrotomy. This procedure is often depicted on TV and in movies as a relatively simple series of steps, such as stabbing a ballpoint pen into the neck, that save the life of a crucial character. But in a real-life combat setting, this tricky treatment must be done very quickly under less than ideal conditions—and it does not always work.

CricSpike team members Jordan Kreger, left, and Sondra Rahmeh practice a neck incision on a medical mannequin, a first step in treating a soldier who has a blocked airway. Image: John Bidlack/Homewood Photography.

In their research, the students discovered that combat medics who attempt a cricothyrotomy in the field are unsuccessful about a third of the time. Even physicians and physician assistants failed about 15 percent of the time in hospital settings. Military experts say more soldiers could be saved if the battlefield cricothyrotomy success rate could be improved.

The need for better combat cricothyrotomy tools quickly became clear to the students. They learned that in recent American military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, 10 to 15 percent of the preventable battlefield deaths were due to airway obstructions or respiratory failure. Many of these injuries were blamed on the growing use of explosive devices.

Preventing some of these deaths became the group’s goal. “We were all excited by the emergency life-saving aspects of this project,” said Antonio Spina of Streamwood, Ill., who served as team leader during his senior year.

The students designed their prototype with an eye toward simplifying and speeding up the procedure, and improving the accuracy of the insertion.

Engineering students Jordan Kreger, left, and Sondra Rahmeh use a medical mannequin to test the way the CricSpike device could create a new airway in an injured soldier’s neck. Photo by John Bidlack/Homewood Photography.

One of the main problems, the students discovered, was that the tools typically used in battle zones often do not manage to connect to the patient’s trachea, commonly called the windpipe. Instead, these tools become lodged just under the patient’s skin or bypass the trachea and instead strike the esophagus, which leads to the stomach, not the lungs.

To remedy this, the students devised an improved intratracheal tip that is carefully crafted to extend beyond the skin layers to the windpipe, but not far enough to reach the esophagus. To insert this tip into the neck, the students devised a two-piece handle that easily breaks away once the tip is connected to the trachea.

For demonstration purposes, the student inventors have packaged the CricSpike tip and its handle as part of a kit that also includes a scalpel to make the neck incision and an endotracheal tube to channel air to the windpipe. The kit also contains a bag valve mask that the medic can attach and squeeze to push air through the tip or tube and into the wounded soldier’s lungs.

In demonstrations with a medical mannequin and animal tissue, the students have shown that their prototype components can work.

The main pieces of the students’ kit will require much more refinement and testing before they could be used on human patients. But the early prototype impressed the judges at the two recent medical device design competitions.

On July 14, the device was awarded second prize in the student project category at the Innovation Research Lab Exhibition, presented at the Central Institute of Healthcare Engineering of Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany.

In addition, the students have worked with the staff of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures in obtaining a provisional patent covering the design of their CricSpike components.

“The students did a great job,” said military physician Gilman, the project’s sponsor. “But the final prototype was still pretty rough. Relying on 3D printing techniques could only get them to a certain level. The next step in the development process would have to involve production of a more professional prototype.”

Team member Qiuyin Ren, of Westborough, Mass., a rising senior, said she and the other team members who will return to Johns Hopkins in the fall intend to build a more polished prototype during the coming school year. The student inventors hope a healthcare device maker eventually will license their design and incorporate it into an improved cricothyrotomy kit for combat areas.

In addition to Ren and team leader Spina, the students who worked on the CricSpike project were Ryan Walter of Pompano Beach, Fla.; Travis Wallace of Ellington, Conn.; Michael Good of Charlotte, N.C.; Himanshu Dashora of Powell, Ohio; Sondra Rahmeh of Austin, Texas; Jordan Kreger of Tecumseh, Mich.; and Ronak Mehta of Somerset, N.J.

Emergency physician Steven Tropello also provided assistance to the team and is included on the provisional patent. Robert H. Allen, a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, served as the team’s faculty sponsor.

WHAT: About 160 high school students at the Johns Hopkins Baltimore campus — and another 425 students across the country — will compete in the annual Spaghetti Bridge Contest, marking the culmination of a four-week summer course called Engineering Innovation. Using only dry spaghetti and epoxy, the students have designed and built bridges that the contest will test. Kilo by kilo, weight will be added to the bridges until they shatter. Prizes will be awarded to the teams whose bridges hold the most weight. The record stands at 60 kilos — 132 pounds.

WHO: Students competing in Baltimore are from 21 states and 14 countries – including some from Baltimore City Schools. Their families will be cheering them on.

WHY: Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering created Engineering Innovation in 2006 to expose high school students to various engineering disciplines and to teach them critical thinking and problem solving. After the program, 86 percent of the participants have gone on to pursue careers in engineering.

Members of the media who expect to cover this event should RSVP to Jill Rosen at 443-997-9906 or 443-547-8805 or jrosen@jhu.edu.

Sunil Kumar, dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a widely published expert on operations management and research, has been appointed the 15th provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins University.

Sunil Kumar

Kumar, who will join the university Sept. 1, was appointed by the executive committee of the Johns Hopkins board of trustees on the recommendation of President Ronald J. Daniels. He has been dean at Chicago Booth since 2011 and previously was professor and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

“Sunil is a proven academic leader with uncompromising standards for excellence, great integrity and a deep-seated commitment to collaboration,” Daniels said. “He is a scholar and leader passionate about higher education, committed to values that align with the priorities of the Johns Hopkins ‘Ten by Twenty’ strategic vision, and well-suited to be a steward and champion of this extraordinary institution.”

As provost, Kumar will be Johns Hopkins’ chief academic officer. He will work with the president and deans on university-wide interdisciplinary collaboration, academic policy, and key priorities including diversity, student aid, and commitment to the communities surrounding Johns Hopkins campuses.

“I’m honored to join and serve the Johns Hopkins community,” Kumar said. “I have long admired the university, its outstanding faculty, and its excellent academic programs. I’m excited to work with President Daniels and the deans to implement the path forward laid out in the Ten by Twenty.

“I look forward to helping Johns Hopkins continue to attract the best faculty and students, while strengthening a welcoming, inclusive and scholarly environment at the university,” Kumar said. “Ensuring Johns Hopkins is the home of choice of a diverse and talented group of faculty members and students is important to me.”

At Chicago, where he is also the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management, Kumar leads a school whose faculty in its history has won seven Nobel Prizes in economics. In five years as dean, he has helped raise more than $300 million; focused on student recruitment, including increasing the enrollment of women in full-time programs from 35 percent to 42 percent; and expanded courses for undergraduates. He was instrumental in establishing the newly consolidated Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which helps researchers across the university translate ideas, discoveries and new technology into products and start-up businesses.

He also teaches a course in operations research, called Dynamic Programming/Markov Decision Processes, introducing doctoral students to mathematical models and optimization methods with applications in both business and engineering.

Before joining Chicago Booth, Kumar was a faculty member for 14 years at Stanford, where he was Fred H. Merrill Professor of Operations, Information and Technology. As senior associate dean, he oversaw Stanford’s MBA program and led faculty groups in marketing and organizational behavior. He won recognition for distinguished teaching three times and was named a Finmeccanica Faculty Scholar.

Kumar came to the study and teaching of management from an academic background in engineering, including his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering, earned in 1996 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“My own research interests have spanned engineering and business,” he said, explaining his longstanding interest in interdisciplinary work. “As dean at Chicago, I have helped spearhead several initiatives that brought the business school closer to other parts of the university, especially the undergraduate college.

“I feel that the professional schools and the rest of the university have a complementary and symbiotic relationship,” he said. “I am deeply attracted to the opportunity to support the faculty and students at Johns Hopkins as it moves closer to the ‘one university’ ideal.”

Kumar’s research has focused on optimizing manufacturing systems, service operations and communications networks and on applying optimization methods and control theory to various managerial problems. He has written or co-written 27 journal articles as well as chapters in three peer-reviewed books, including one, in a political economy text, on the behavior of voters and the political parties who seek their support.

Born in India, he graduated in 1990 from Mangalore University with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Two years later, he earned a Master of Engineering in systems science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Kumar will succeed Robert C. Lieberman as provost. Lieberman announced in February that he would step down to return full-time to research and teaching in his field of race and inequality. He will be a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Political Science Department of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and will be part of the university’s interdisciplinary 21st Century Cities Initiative.

Project is the first practical system to avert disruption amid cyber attack

Johns Hopkins University computer scientists have led an effort to create a proven way to prevent sabotage from disrupting electronic networks supporting major infrastructure such as power grids and the electronic cloud.

The system – meant to protect against the sort of attack that in 2010 disrupted thousands of internet networks in the United States and around the world – is now available to the public as open source and was scheduled to be presented by the researchers today at an engineering conference in Japan.

“As the internet becomes an important part of the infrastructure our society depends on, it is crucial to construct networks that are able to work even when part of the network is compromised,” the authors wrote in their summary of the research led by Yair Amir, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering. Amir and three of the papers co-authors also affiliated with Johns Hopkins were scheduled to present their solution today for this long-standing network security challenge to the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, sponsored by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Nara, Japan. The other three Johns Hopkins scientists making the presentation are Thomas Tantillo and Amy Babay, both doctoral students, and Daniel Obenshain, who just finished his doctorate in computer science.

The four Johns Hopkins scientists worked on the project as part of a team of eight researchers from three universities and two private technology companies. The universities are Northeastern and Purdue and the tech companies are Spread Concepts, LLC and LTN Global Communications.

Developed over the course of five years, this approach to protecting a network has been proven to keep a network going if part of it is compromised by an attack. The authors call this the “first practical intrusion-tolerant network service” because this is the first network service that can overcome sophisticated attacks and compromises and be deployed on a global scale over the existing internet. The system was evaluated and validated in a test that ran for nearly a year using the LTN Global Communications cloud spanning East Asia, North America and Europe. The test showed success, albeit with a higher cost that makes sense for vital infrastructure, such as power grids and the cloud.

The authors say this system would have protected the internet from the sort of disruption that occurred in April 2010, when some 8,000 U.S. networks were affected by bad routing information sent by a Chinese Internet Service Provider (ISP) through a state-owned company in China. The disruption appeared to be an accident, and may have stopped some traffic and redirected other traffic to malicious computers in China.

Amir said that as a rule, networks are based on trust that members showing the right credentials really are who they appear to be. That trust is easily exploited by saboteurs who manage to obtain valid member credentials. In effect, Amir said, the researchers on this project have created “a system where no one is trusted.”

Instead, an “overlay” system looks beyond credentials, verifying that claims made by members of the network make sense. However, even members of the network who make valid claims are not completely trusted. The most sophisticated attack, Amir said “you may not be able to detect. You can only detect the guys who are not sophisticated. They made a mistake.”

Rather than relying on detecting sabotage that would divert traffic, the system sends redundant messages over multiple paths to avoid relying on any single node, or data center, to faithfully transmit messages to their intended destinations. The user can select different degrees of redundancy with higher cost.

A rough analogy would be to a cargo delivery fleet. If a driver – even one carrying the right credentials – claims he can move the goods a great deal faster or cheaper than expected, something is clearly amiss. However, even if the driver proposes a reasonable cost and timeframe, he may not actually deliver the goods. To protect against this, the fleet can run more than one truck to make the same delivery to ensure at least one of the packages arrives at the right destination.

To ensure that there is at least one path through the network that can faithfully transmit messages, the network service is built with enough redundancy “to prevent anything short of a complete simultaneous meltdown of multiple ISP backbones from interrupting the ability to deliver messages,” the authors wrote, allowing critical services to continue to work without any downtime.

The authors write that the system “provides a complete and practical solution for high-value applications that previous work, including our own past efforts, has failed to offer.”

This research was supported in part by grant N660001-1-2-4014 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.

It’s tough to play video games when you have no fingers to push buttons on the controller.

Just ask Gyorgy (George) Levay, an avid gamer who lost both hands to a meningitis infection five years ago. But Levay and two fellow Johns Hopkins grad students have devised a clever way get him, and others with similar disabilities, back in the game.

Their solution—a sandal-like controller that allows a player to control the on-screen action with his or her feet—recently won the $7,500 grand prize in the 2016 Intel-Cornell Cup, in which student inventors were judged on innovative applications of embedded technology.

To master’s degree candidate Levay, the project is about much more than recovering his ability to play video games.

“About 200,000 people in the United States alone have lost at least some part of an upper limb,” he said, “and 20 to 30 percent of all amputees suffer from depression. They have a hard time socializing, especially young people.”

Especially for those with highly visible impairments, online video games can be a boon, Levay said, because a player’s appearance is not typically on view.

“The GEAR controller allows people to socialize in a way in which their disability is not a factor,” Levay said. “That was a key point we wanted to make with this device.”

To create a hands-free control system, Levay, who is from Budapest, Hungary, teamed up last year with two other biomedical engineering grad students from his Johns Hopkins instrumentation course: Adam Li from Los Angeles and Nhat (Nate) Tran, from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

The students decided to design a game interface that could be operated by a player’s lower limbs. “Next to our hands,” Li said, “our feet are probably the most dexterous part of our body.”

By the time their third prototype was built, the team had produced adjustable padded footwear that could enable a seated player to participate in video games. Beneath each shoe’s padding are three sensors that can pick up various foot movements, such as tilting or raising the front or heel of each foot.

The students designed intricate circuitry within each shoe that translates each foot movement into a different command to guide the activity in a video game. In its most basic setup, two of the high-tech shoes can control eight different game buttons. But the inventors say that with practice, this number could increase to as many as 20 buttons.

The GEAR team has successfully used the technology to play popular games such as Counter-Strike, Fallout 4 and World of Warcraft. The students also set up a small online survey, putting four virtual characters through the same challenging segment of a video game. When the game clips were posted online, viewers were asked to identify which character was being controlled by an amputee using the GEAR technology. Of the 51 viewers who participated in the survey, 81 percent failed to identify the correct GEAR-controlled character.

The GEAR team devised these game controller shoes that respond to different foot movements. Photo by John Bidlack /homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

“This is a very simple design,” Tran said, “but it can potentially help a lot of people since it’s wearable, and it’s adjustable.”

For team member Li, the project was particularly rewarding because it allowed him to apply his knowledge to a real-life challenge, not just a teacher’s test questions. Sometimes as an engineering student, he said, “you’re stuck in a classroom, and you’re learning about all these theories, but you don’t get to put it into practice. This problem really allowed us to design a solution and actually implement it.”

The GEAR team members have worked with the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures staff to obtain a provisional patent covering their invention. Their goal is to license their work to a company that can help make their device widely available.

For health workers in the field treating people stricken with Ebola and other diseases, a protective suit is the first defense against infection. The suit and head covering itself, however, can hamper their ability to help by impeding breathing, or heating up so quickly in high temperatures and humidity that they can scarcely work for more than an hour.

Johns Hopkins University engineering students and team members hope to solve these problems as they improve a protective suit to be manufactured by DuPont Protection Solutions (DuPont) under an agreement forged last year between the university and the international science and engineering company. Two Johns Hopkins mechanical engineering undergraduate teams, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID) have developed prototypes for a more comfortable hood and face mask that make breathing easier, and for a battery-powered system that curbs humidity in the suit.

DuPont has licensed intellectual property for a coverall, hood and full body suit designed and prototyped by CBID last year. Each product reduces the number of pieces required by current protocols, takes much less time to put on and remove, and cuts the number of potential contamination exposure points by nearly a third. The two recent projects by seniors at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering are meant to improve the CBID designs even further.

“The hope for us is this could be used for any infectious disease that’s transmitted through bodily fluids,” said Laura Scavo, who graduated in May with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked on the hood as a final project. Under a grant, she is continuing to work with the CBID team this summer.

“The aim of our device is to extend the working time of health care workers in an Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) by increasing thermal comfort, and thus decreasing the risk of heat-induced psychological and physiological impairments,” the students who worked on the cooling system wrote in their final report.

Worn around the waist, the humidity-control apparatus adapts an off-the-shelf powered air purifying respirator and looks almost like something one would expect to see as part of a space suit. It includes a canister connected by a hose to a boxy fan unit, which in turn is connected with a second hose that runs up the wearer’s back to the head covering. The system draws air in through the canister cartridge filled with a chemical drying agent, or desiccant. The desiccant soaks up moisture, delivering drier air to the person wearing the suit.

The project presented many challenges, some solved, some still in the works. The cartridge containing the desiccant had to be designed not to overheat due to the chemical reaction that occurs as the material absorbs moisture. In one laboratory experiment, the material overheated so fast that it melted a plastic container.

There was also the difficulty of sealing joints between the several pieces to create the most efficient airflow, and keep out potential contaminants. That’s still being figured out as the apparatus is tested and refined, but the team succeeded in key goals. The system significantly cuts humidity. The used desiccant cartridge can be regenerated with heating equipment commonly available at field treatment centers, and at 3.8 pounds the unit is well below the goal of 10 pounds.

In the hood project, Scavo improved on a model produced by CBID months earlier. Among other changes, she redesigned the integrated facemask to produce a good fit for a wide range of face sizes, adjusted filter placements so that the design would meet certification by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and worked with DuPont to develop prototypes for testing that could be mass produced.

Scavo and the team conducted field tests in Liberia this spring for the coverall and facemask. Feedback for refinements will be turned over to DuPont as the Johns Hopkins team pursues further grants to continue working on the project.

“A tremendous amount of effort has been put into this project by Johns Hopkins and DuPont in less than a year of development,” said David Kee, North American marketing manager for Tyvek® protective apparel, the brand name for clothing made by DuPont Protection Solutions. “DuPont is still evaluating the commercial viability of these enhancements; some innovations are conceptually appealing, but need further refinement prior to mass production. We look forward to our continued work together to strike the right balance and bring a truly innovative product to a wide market.”